Conferences, Seminars and Other Events

2011

Sydney Emerging Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity Institute (SEIB) Colloquium - November 23-24, 2011
Brochure | Program

2010

Keynote Oration: Preventing Cancer, Promoting Global Health and Development - 10 June 2010
Conference: Legislate, Regulate, Litigate? Legal Perspectives on Cancer Prevention and Treatment - 11 June 2010
Conference and Oration Report

2009

Conference - Regulating the Public's Health - 28 August 2009
Global Health Beyond the Millennium Development Goals - 6 August 2009
Event details | Conference report
Ethics and World Poverty - 13 July 2009
Hypothetical: A Womb With a View - 30 April 2009
Diagnosing Homicide: Forensic Psychiatry and the Purposeless Murder - 9 April 2009
HGLE Oration 2009: Sharing Caring in a Time of Budget Insufficiency - Is There an Ethical Reform Paradigm? - 26 March 2009
Conference Report: The Garling oration: “small steps” towards addressing the challenge of health resource allocation in the public hospital system
Written version of Garling Oration: Sharing Caring in a Time of Budget Insufficiency

2008

2007

Crossing Borders: Legal, Security and Health Perspectives on Pandemic Influenza - 23 November 2007
Sociological reflections on ethics, embryonic stem cells and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis - 26 June 2007
Speaker: Professor Steven Wainwright & Professor Clare Williams King’s College London, University of London
In this seminar we draw upon our recent and ongoing research projects on ‘the embryo’. We discuss the problems and prospects of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, particularly the interactions between the lab and the clinic. We also discuss practitioners’ views on the ethical issues of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). We begin with an examination of some of the key differences between philosophical and empirical approaches to ethics and we outline how the concept of ‘boundary-work’ illuminates ethics, the embryo, hESC and PGD. We then explore the ethical views of scientists from two other social science perspectives: firstly, through the framework of Pierre Bourdieu – and particularly the idea of ethical capital in the field of science. Secondly, we explore ethical landscapes in stem cell research through a geographies of science approach. We then bring these ideas together and argue that a ‘Bourdieusian Geographies’ perspective is helpful in understanding new medical technologies as moral economies. We illustrate this idea of ‘moral connections between worlds’ through a discussion of what has been heralded as a ‘new paradigm in biomedicine’, the ‘disease-in-a-dish’ approach which is beginning to link the worlds of human embryonic stem cells and PGD. We conclude our seminar by raising a set of broader ethical and social issues that are often overlooked in bioethical debates on the embryo, PGD and stem cells.